The United Nations Foundation, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and others have recognized the crucial role played by OpenStreetMap in relief efforts in Haiti and elsewhere.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a community of approximately 150,000 mappers dedicated to building a free and open map of the world. OSM mobilized more than 640 volunteers around the world, who scanned and rectified old atlases and maps and traced Haitian roads, bridges, and buildings into the OpenStreetMap geospatial wiki using tools that only required a simple web browser and time. In the process, this community turned a blank spot on the map into one of the most accurately mapped countries in the world—creating a map far better than any available to the UN. By mid-March, OpenStreetMap had become the de facto source for Haiti map data within most UN agencies and the EC Humanitarian Unit. MapAction credits OpenStreetMap with providing an essential service and for building a street map of Haiti from scratch in about two weeks, a project that should have taken about a year.

April is food month. We’ll be tagging various portions of the food supply system in and around our homes. We’ll look at Farmers’ Markets for the full month; venues for many vendors of food directly from the source. Through the month we’ll look at individual vendors of various foods. As always, Project of the Week and Project of the Month exist only to encourage your mapping. You don’t need to wait for a project to add a cheese shop to the map! Unless, of course, you waited for this week! This week, prepared foods.

Delicatessen, convenience stores and prepared food

Prepared foods occupy that middle ground between groceries and a restaurant. Some delicatessens have seating and table service, and might be correctly tagged as {{tag|amenity|restaurant}}. But the stock in trade of the deli is prepared food. Cured meat, or potato salad, or caviar, or herbed olive oil for inclusion in your family meals. The convenience store might provide you with a pre-made sandwich and a carton of milk, but table service is unlikely. So is a chair. Recent studies have found that urban areas with financial challenges often lack the markets and grocery stores from earlier in this project of the month.

“OpenStreetBlock – a web service for turning a given lat/lon coordinate (e.g. 40.737813,-73.997887) into a textual description of the actual city block to which the coordinate points (e.g. “West 14th Street bet. 6th Ave. & 7th Ave”) using OpenStreetMap data.”

The Google Maps Terms of Service have been modified with a number of changes that relate to advertising and usage limits. Remember that OSM also has a tile usage policy for its servers, but of course you can always setup your own tile server (using Tile Drawer for example) or use tiles hosted by third parties like MapQuest.

MapQuest has released three new services. The XAPI service is using the newly developed Java XAPI. The Nominatim Pre-indexed Data Service can be used to speed up your own Nominatim installation process. The Broken Polygon Report for Nominatim can be used to fix polygon data in OSM.

Authors: Jonas, Pascal & Dennis Did we miss something? Do you want to help us collecting the news for next week’s issue? You can contact us via mail or Twitter.

April is food month for Project of the Week / Month. We’ll be tagging various portions of the food supply system in and around our homes. We’ll look at marketplaces for the full month; venues for many vendors where you can buy directly from the source. Through the month we’ll look at individual vendors of various foods. As always, Project of the Week and Project of the Month exist only to encourage your mapping. You don’t need to wait for a project to add a cheese shop to the map! Unless, of course, you waited for this week! This week, we address the cheese shop and other specialty food ingredient shops.

We first told you about the Saransk Mapping Party last month when OpenStreetMap contributors showed us an animation of the mapping event. A month later, they have created a video that combines animation of the mapping party with various renderings for various uses and photos of the ground truth. Enjoy the video.

This is a Featured image, which means that it has been identified as one of the best examples of OpenStreetMap mapping, or that it provides a useful illustration related to the OpenStreetMap project.